Meatpacking has never been the safest, or the most pleasant, job. Now, under the Trump administration, workers are facing another hazard – the threat of deportation.
“We were working in the plant and the agents showed up with machine guns and started taking everyone outside,” 20-year-old “Carlos”, a meatpacker at the Fresh Mark meatpacking plant in Salem, Ohio, told the Guardian.
Last week, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents conducted their largest workplace raid to date at Fresh Mark, arresting more than 140 workers. The Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) says that in addition to those arrested, Ice is currently holding unexecuted arrest warrants for another 110 Fresh Mark workers employed at several facilities throughout Ohio. The news is striking fear in the heart of the region’s growing immigrant communities.
Carlos, who wished not to be identified, arrived from Guatemala four and half years ago to help his undocumented father, who has been living in the US for 15 years, by sending money back home to his two younger siblings in Guatemala.
Like many of his colleagues he is now worried that an industry dominated by undocumented workers has become the favorite hunting ground for Ice officers determined to pursue Trump’s tough crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
The Ohio raid followed the arrest of more than 100 immigrants in a raid in April on a plant owned by Southeast Provisions in Morristown, Tennessee. With Trump announcing that he plans to quadruple the number of workplace raids, organized labor and immigrants’ rights groups are responding rapidly in the hopes that rapid legal aid and education will help immigrants workers successfully fight off deportation.
The RWDSU has set up a resource center in the basement of St Paul Catholic church in Salem, providing food, diapers and gift cards to families that have lost their breadwinners. The union is also giving workers access to immigration and workplace safety attorneys.
“We are all family and we are all one, and if one of us is down, we are all gonna be there to help pick up,” said Juan Moscoso, an immigrant from Peru working as a shop steward at a nearby sister plant in Ohio. “We are a union and we are going to stand for one another.”
But the immigrant communities are still feeling particularly vulnerable.
Meatpacking is dangerous, fast-moving work that relies on undocumented workers. Census data indicates that one-third of meatpacking jobs are done by immigrants, although that percentage is probably much higher due to underreporting, especially in the current environment of low unemployment where employers are scrambling to find workers. Undocumented workers are also less likely to report violations for fear of attracting attention – and deportation.
A week before the raid on Fresh Mark’s Salem facility, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Fresh Mark $211,194 for three separate incidents in which proper guards for dangerous machinery were not in place. OSHA found that the lack of safety guards resulted in the death of an undocumented worker.
Last December, Domingo Ramos, a 49-year-old undocumented worker from Guatemala, was killed when his foot was sucked into a rotating auger, ripping off his lower leg and leading to him bleeding to death.
Many in organized labor suspect that the media attention following the death of an undocumented worker at a Fresh Mark facility in Ohio may have resulted in increased scrutiny being placed on all of Fresh Mark’s Ohio facilities.
It’s unclear why Ice chose to raid the plant. Ice did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
The plant had been the site of tension between the growing Latino community working in the meatpacking plants and the surrounding white rust belt community. The anti-immigrant Ohio Jobs and Justice political action committee held protests outside the plant over the company hiring undocumented workers in 2011, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
However, despite the increased scrutiny on meatpacking plants, workplace safety activists say that the raids on poultry facilities are unlikely to make a dent in the high turnover immigrant workforce employed by them. Instead, the raids will probably lead to more dangerous conditions for newly arrived immigrant workers to these communities.
“These raids send a real signal to immigrant workers not to speak up and we feel like these raids enable employers in the most dangerous industry to cut corners and violate labor standards,” says Debbie Berkowitz, who served as chief of staff of OSHA under Obama from 2009 to 2013 and now serves as the director of the worker health and safety program at the National Employment Law Project (NELP).
The raids come as statistics show that enforcement at OSHA is dramatically down according to a new report put out by the NELP. In 2017, the first year of data under the Trump administration, there were 1,071 fewer enforcement inspections by OSHA than in 2016. More startling, the report showed that in the first five months of 2018, enforcements were down by 1,163 from the already low level for 2017.
Instead of focusing on protecting workers, workplace safety experts say that decreasing workplace safety standards under Trump will make more meatpacking workers scared of speaking out.
“Meatpacking is a very dangerous industry – rather than hold employers accountable for violating basic work protections, this administration has chosen to target and arrest the workers,” said Berkowitz.